Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  “Left out in the cold is Gerri, who, along with being Eszterhas’s wife, used to be Naomi’s best friend. ‘Even by Hollywood standards,’ says one Paramount executive, ‘the whole thing’s weird.’”

  Guy suggested we sit down with Army Archerd, Hollywood’s unofficial gossip historian.

  We had a delightful lunch with Army at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and I told him that “Guy McElwaine kids me about setting this whole thing up, of introducing Bill and Sharon purposely so I could have Naomi for myself.”

  When Army’s story came out, at the very top of his well-read column, it said, “Joe admits that he introduced Bill and Sharon so he could have Naomi for himself.”

  Everyone in town was suddenly talking about Army’s story … about how the guy who wrote Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct was so manipulative and devious that he even manipulated his friend (Bill) to get his friend’s wife (Naomi).

  It reminded me of the time Army said that I had quit the Rolling Stones rock band to write the script called F.I.S.T.

  There was a party at Evans’s house for the cast and crew of Sliver.

  Naomi and I decided to go.

  We got a standing ovation from everyone when we walked in.

  One of Bob’s bimbos—the one who’d come over to my hotel with a note from Bob wearing nothing but a fur coat—said to me, with Naomi right beside me, “So why her and not me?”

  Jon Peters, the fabled producer, and Mark Canton, the chairman of Sony, wanted to talk about Gangland, the script I had contracted to do for them … over dinner at the Grille in Beverly Hills.

  I asked if I could bring Naomi but they said this was business only and I left Naomi in our suite at the Four Seasons.

  We had a pleasant dinner during which it became obvious to me that Jon was the man in charge. Mark even referred to him several times as his “rabbi.” Jon had a street-smart gravitas about him (in relative Hollywood terms), while Mark kept bobbing around him like Jon’s own little jack-in-the-box.

  I remembered the first time I had met Mark at Warner Brothers nearly twenty years ago, and Mark had shown up with a pair of bright red boxing gloves because he had heard I was a tough guy.

  Nothing much had changed, I saw, in twenty years. I could imagine him with the shiny red boxing gloves at this dinner, too.

  As dinner was winding down, two young women who just happened to have the booth right next to us came over to the table.

  Jon and Mark knew them and introduced them to me. They were above-average Hollywood model-actresses carved by surgeons, puffed by chemicals.

  Mark excused himself and said he had to go home. Jon asked the two young women to join us.

  They sat down—one next to me, one next to Jon—and I said I had to go, too.

  Jon said, “No you don’t. Let’s all go to my house and smoke some great dope and get to know each other better.”

  I looked at the two young women and I realized there was nothing better I would have liked—before I met Naomi.

  “Jon,” I said, “I’m just in the process of putting my ex-wife and kids through a terrible time and the woman who I’m doing that for is at the Four Seasons waiting for me.”

  I grinned and said, “I’ve gotta go, man,” and got up.

  “Hey,” Jon said, “what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

  I said, “It’ll hurt me.”

  One of the young women put her hand on my arm and said, “That’s so sweet!”

  Jon said, “Putz.”

  But he was smiling as I left.

  I knew he had good reason to think that kind of evening might appeal to me.

  The first time I met Jon, about eight months before I met Naomi, I was supposed to see him for lunch at his house at 11:30.

  I got there at 12:45.

  He was pissed.

  “Where the fuck were you?” he said.

  I said, “I got delayed.”

  “You couldn’t call me?”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.”

  “Time to get one,” he said.

  He said, “I make a deal with you for over three million dollars and you can’t show up on time for our first meeting? What kind of shit is that?”

  I decided the one chance I had here was to tell this pissed-off Hollywood animal the truth.

  I had been with a young woman in my suite at the Four Seasons who’d been with me the night before … and we got up late and had a champagne room service breakfast … and one thing led to another … and I knew that if I went nosing and prowling around inside her … I’d be late for Jon … and I chose her over Jon.

  “I’m really sorry I was late,” I said as I concluded my story.

  He glared at me—his eyes like flat rocks—and he said, “You’ve got a lot of balls to tell me that story.”

  I said, “From everything I hear about you—in that same situation—you would’ve made the same decision. You would’ve been late for lunch, too.”

  “Only when I was younger,” Jon Peters said. “When I cared about pussy more than money.”

  He smiled a killer smile. “I’m older and wiser now.”

  Then he said, “Come on, I’ll show you around,” put his arm around me, and led me outside to show me his magnificent estate.

  With tabloids all over the world writing about what they called “the Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice aspect” of our relationship, Guy convinced me that I needed a Hollywood PR man to “handle the situation.”

  I had just left my wife of twenty-four years for a much younger woman and my new press representative (or “rep”) was nervous that my movie Sliver was being released “in this climate.”

  “I’m worried,” my rep said. “You’re too high-profile. The media’s going to come down on you. ‘Husband and Father Leaves Wife and Kids for Hot Blonde.’ That’s going to be their take. I need an angle.”

  “What kind of an angle?”

  “Something you can talk about in the interviews before Sliver opens. Something that will neutralize the flak.”

  I knew his credentials were good. He represented big-name movie stars.

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Were you abused as a kid?”

  I said, “What do you mean?”

  “Anything from sex to being hit.”

  “My mom used to slap me a lot. My dad separated his shoulder hitting me once.”

  “He separated his shoulder hitting you? That’s awful! I’m sorry.”

  I said, “Forget it. It hardly hurt. He was in really bad physical shape. Way overweight. It sounds worse than it was.”

  “What about your mother’s slaps?” he said. “What kind of slaps were they—did they hurt?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did they traumatize you?”

  “Sure. She wanted to traumatize me. It got my attention.”

  “Do you want to talk about it publicly?”

  “She did it for my own good. She was right. I deserved it.”

  “Come on”—he smiled—“get with the program here. We’ve got to find something.”

  “I loved my parents,” I said. “My mom’s life was hard. She was a schizophrenic.”

  “Voices?” he said. “Split personality? All that?”

  “Yes.”

  “It couldn’t have been easy.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “So you want to talk about it publicly?”

  I said, “No thank you.”

  He laughed.

  “Okay,” he said, “how did you grow up?”

  “Poor. Dirt poor. I got into trouble a lot.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Rolling drunks. Breaking and entering. Stealing cars. I almost killed a kid with a baseball bat.”

  “Jesus,” he said, “you’re kidding.”

  I said, “It wasn’t as tough as the refugee camps.”

  “What refugee camps?”

  I told him about the camps in Austria, about eating pine needle soup, about
getting rickets, about watching the old lady who lay down on the railroad tracks in front of the train.

  “You saw that?”

  “I did.”

  “You ate that stuff—what was it? Tree leaf soup?”

  “Pine needle soup. I ate it, yes.”

  “Fantastic,” he said. “Fantastic!”

  He booked me on TV shows and on radio. He even booked me into chat rooms on the Internet.

  All before Sliver came out.

  I talked about the pine needle soup, about the rickets, about the old lady on the railroad tracks.

  It worked.

  An old lady committing suicide on the railroad tracks is a much better story than just another wife dumped after twenty-four years of marriage.

  Sharon was going to the Sliver premiere with Bill and I was going with Naomi. Paramount was nervous. Sharon, the diva, insisted that she and Bill arrive last so that she and Bill would be the stars of the paparazzi show.

  I purposely delayed our driver and got there late, minutes before Sharon and Bill’s scheduled arrival.

  The paparazzi had never seen Naomi and me together and wanted hundreds of pictures. We smiled and posed for them.

  A Paramount PR person came up to us. “You guys have to get inside,” she said.

  “We’ve got time,” I said casually.

  “No we don’t. We’ve got to start on time. Sharon isn’t here yet.”

  “She’d better hurry,” I said.

  Naomi and I started smooching for the photographers. The PR woman started to sort of jitter around in circles.

  I glanced behind us and saw Sharon and Bill arriving. They couldn’t wait any longer. The showing would start without them.

  The paparazzi were still taking pictures of us smooching. Sharon and Bill were only a few feet away now.

  A reporter yelled, “How do you spell Naomi’s last name?”

  I stopped and yelled, “M-A-C-D-O-N-A-L-D!”

  Sharon and Bill were ten feet behind us. Bill looked stricken. Sharon looked like she could kill me.

  I looked at Naomi. She was smiling radiantly.

  Naomi’s journal:

  We went to the Sliver premiere Tuesday night. As we got out of the limo, Joe had his arm around me so tightly I could see white imprints on my shoulder from his fingers. I was overwhelmed by the whole scene. I’ve never even been to a premiere let alone the center of attention at one. Then we finally get inside in the dark and I’m so relieved.

  When Joe wrote the script he had used my name in it for a peripheral character. Bill told me months ago, but I had forgotten. About fifteen minutes into the movie, Sharon says, “You slept with Naomi, didn’t you?”

  Joe laughed and I died. I felt like thirty pairs of eyes looked over at me. It was all so twisted.

  Then we went to the after-party. Joe had told me earlier that his only concern for anything ugly happening was some friend of Sharon’s who reportedly was seething from my Current Affair performance. I never saw her.

  It was the first time I’d seen the movie.

  I hated it.

  The final line of dialogue—“Get a life!”—was the final nail in the coffin … a line written, studio executives told me, by Sharon Stone, although the whole world thought I’d written it since I was the only writer listed.

  The big mistake had been made by Stanley Jaffe, the studio head, who took the first focus group’s dislike of the original ending so seriously that he forced Phillip Noyce (and me) to junk the script and reshoot the movie.

  It made me wonder what would have happened if Basic Instinct had been focus-grouped. I was sure that a focus group would have hated that ending, too.

  Stanley should have stuck to Sliver’s original ending and its rough cut … Sharon finds out Billy Baldwin is the killer and essentially says, “I don’t care what he is, I love him and I know he loves me.”

  It would have been a daring and provocative movie instead of this mess.

  Critics thought it was a mess, too, although audiences abroad put the movie above the $100 million mark.

  Naomi and I and Evans and a bimbo took a limo across town the night Sliver opened and talked to the theatergoers who had just seen the movie.

  “Hello,” Evans said to a young black woman who had just come out of the theater. “Did you just see Sliver?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you like it?”

  “It sucked. It was terrible. It was the worst. Don’t waste your money on it.”

  “Really.”

  “Don’t do it!”

  “Well, all right, thank you.”

  “Hey, man,” the young black woman said, “who are you?”

  “I’m just a poor broken-down Jew.”

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m the most miserable Jew in the world,” Evans said.

  · · ·

  We limoed over to Palm Springs with Evans and one of his bimbos. He stayed at the Racquet Club, a famed Hollywood resort of the thirties and forties, now fallen on seedier times.

  Naomi and I stayed at the Ritz-Carlton in Rancho Mirage; we didn’t want to be around Bob all the time.

  We were in Evans’s bungalow one night and one of Bob’s girls, now hooking in Palm Springs and Vegas, took out a Polaroid camera and started taking pictures of us.

  “You take one more picture of us,” I told her, “and I’ll break the camera.”

  I didn’t trust where a Polaroid taken by one of Evans’s girls would wind up.

  When we were headed back to L.A., Naomi and I picked Bob and his bimbo up at the Racquet Club. Bloody towels were everywhere around the pool. The bimbo liked to sunbathe in the nude and she was having her period.

  The odd thing was that as sky-high, over-the-top in love as we were, I missed Bill and Naomi missed Gerri.

  Bill and I had spoken every day for many months before he and Naomi broke up—we’d prowled the bars and clubs together, shared a thousand laughs.

  And Naomi felt the same way about Gerri. She kept telling me stories about how much fun she and Gerri had had … before I broke up with Gerri.

  Neither of us had a close friend that we loved around us anymore … and it made us sad.

  Bob’s brother, Charlie Evans, who had advanced me two million dollars to write Showgirls, was threatening to sue me.

  I was a month late with the script and I hadn’t even started writing it yet.

  I liked Charlie and sat down to have a drink with him. He liked to drink almost as much as I did.

  Charlie said, “I hear on pretty good information that you’re never going to be able to write again, that your wife is the anchor in your life and without that anchor, you won’t be able to write. I think you’re going a little crazy.”

  I said, “Charlie, have you ever been crazy in love in your life?”

  Warily he said, “Yes.”

  “Do I look like a man who’s crazy in love to you or a man who’s lost all his marbles?”

  He looked at me, smiled, and said, “Okay. I hear you.”

  I said, “Who told you all this stuff about my wife being my anchor?”

  “Bill Macdonald,” Charlie said.

  I told Charlie to hold off suing me for two months—which is when I promised I’d have the script.

  · · ·

  We decided to go back to Maui, rent a house, and stay there while I wrote Showgirls.

  We flew up to San Francisco so I could see Steve and Suzi and so I could tell them what we were going to do. They told me that Gerri wanted to see me this time.

  Before I met Gerri at Sam’s, an outdoor bar in Tiburon, Naomi and I had lunch at Scoma’s on the wharf in San Francisco. I suddenly started to shake. I went to the bathroom, where I tried to take deep breaths. It didn’t do any good. Now I was not only shaking but I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  I went back to the table and lit a cigarette with dancing hands and told Naomi I thought I was having an anxiety attack.

  I reached for my
glass of wine, but I was shaking so badly I couldn’t get it to my lips. She held the glass to my lips and I drank the wine.

  Then I did that myself with two or three glasses and I was okay.

  I got to Sam’s early and had another three or four glasses of wine before Gerri got there. I was starting to shake again; my guilts kicking into overdrive.

  I got up to hug Gerri when she came in but she backed away and sat down in the booth across from me. She looked pale and exhausted. We found it excruciatingly difficult to look at and talk to each other.

  I asked how Steve and Suzi were doing.

  She said they were okay—Suzi, she said, cried a lot; Steve had sunk more into himself.

  “So, Joseph,” Gerri said without looking at me, “are you happy with your whore?”

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “It’s beneath you to do that.”

  “I saw the pictures of the two of you kissing at the movie premiere,” Gerri said. “Tell me something, Joseph? Why would you want to hurt me like that? Why would you want to hurt Steve and Suzi like that? Didn’t you even consider the pain those pictures would cause us?”

  I said, “You’re right. I’m sorry. It just … happened.”

  Gerri said, “What’s going to happen now, Joseph?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Gerri said, “Are you still in love with her?”

  I said, “Yes. Completely.”

  She looked down at the table—as though she couldn’t stand to look at me anymore. In a wounded little girl’s voice, Gerri said, “What should I do, Joseph? Tell me what I should do to help myself. You’ve always been there to help. Tell me what I should do now, Joseph.”

  I put my hands on Gerri’s. She intertwined her fingers with mine … a little girl, holding on and scared … and I said, “Get a good lawyer.”

  She looked at me with a worldful of hurt in her eyes. She said, “Have a nice life, Joseph,” got up, and was gone.

  I sat in the booth and ordered another glass of wine and then another and another.

  I still had to see Steve and Suzi.

  My children got there about an hour after their mother left.

  Steve was inheld, monosyllabic. Suzi was pissed.

  She said, “Do you have any idea how much I used to admire you, Dad? I used to think I had the best father in the world. Well I don’t anymore, Dad!”